The Unexpected Past of Miss Jane Austen (ARC)

by Ada Bright

  Christopher took her hand. ‘I am a selfish man and would keep you here if I could, but I do not want any doubts in either of our hearts. If I am to have you back in my life permanently, I want to be certain there is no way back to your former life. Only then will I feel at peace with the happiness that could be.’

  Rose smiled tremulously at him. How comforting it was to have a parent looking out for her.

  ‘I wish I knew how to start. Where to start, and—’

  She stopped and they both looked around as the door opened and Anne came in, carrying a cup.

  ‘Tea, Rose. Mama says you must drink it, for it is hot and sweet and will aid you.’ She placed it on a side table.

  ‘Please thank her, Anne.’

  The girl smiled widely and turned to pick up her book from the floor, and Rose looked back at her father.

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’ She put a hand to her head. ‘If I was at home, when I needed answers, I would just jump on Google…’

  Anne looked up, an eager expression on her face. ‘Is Google your mount?’

  Rose stared at her blankly for a moment; then, her father cleared his throat.

  ‘Oh, er… no.’ Rose threw him a grateful look before continuing. ‘It is a resource for… for information.’

  ‘Like our encyclopedias!’ Anne turned towards the bookcase. ‘Shall I fetch one? Which letters would suffice?’

  ‘That is very kind, Anne.’ Christopher smiled at his daughter. ‘But I think it best we take some air.’ He held out an arm to Rose. ‘Come, my dear. Let us walk in the garden.’

  Chapter 27

  Once outside, Christopher placed Rose’s hand on his arm and they strolled along the path towards the wall bordering the cottage. Despite the turmoil in her head, Rose felt so much calmer now they were alone and able to talk openly. Much as she was growing to like her new family, she was not really prepared for the strain of pretence right now.

  Christopher glanced over his shoulder, then slowed their steps, turning her to face him. ‘Tell me all you can recall about how you came to be here, and do not spare any detail. We do not know what may aid us until we attempt to piece together all we comprehend thus far.’

  Rose blew out a frustrated breath. ‘That’s half the problem. There’s not much to it. Whatever is between Jane and the cross happens silently; any thought she has stays in her head.’

  ‘You have never spoken of it to her? Asked her how the charm functions?’

  Rose shook her head, feeling stupid. ‘Why didn’t I ever ask her? She told me she simply puts the necklace on and, whichever way it faces – the charm, that is – it takes her forward or backward in time. In an instant.’ She paused, thinking hard. ‘It is what happened when she brought me and Aiden,’ her voice faltered over his name, ‘back with her. Everything went black for a moment, barely a second, and then we were here.’

  She raised troubled eyes to her father, but he didn’t look disbelieving or sceptical.

  ‘Believe it or not, Rosie, I comprehend all you say. But this is insufficient to aid you. Try to concentrate. What is stored in our memories may be quite singular, but significant all the same.’

  Rose stared at a bumblebee burrowing into a nearby flower. What did she recall that might be of any note? ‘Right. Well, the first time something went wrong, when Prancer – er, Link – swallowed the charm, reality changed around us just as quickly as when we travelled through time. I was preoccupied with the lady’s reaction as I honestly didn’t believe she was who she accidentally admitted to being.’ She smiled slightly at Christopher’s bemused expression. ‘It was a very confusing few days.’

  ‘The days preceding this event you describe, or the days following?’

  Rose raised her brows meaningfully. ‘Both. Definitely both.’

  Christopher grunted. ‘But this is not slipping through time, if I understand you? This is…’

  ‘An alternate reality. Yes, it wasn’t time related, no blackness or anything.’

  ‘And that is all you recall, beyond your personal experience with the charm?’

  Rose tried so hard to come up with something, anything that might be of use, but she shook her head sadly. ‘There is nothing else.’

  Christopher gestured over towards a wooden bench beneath an apple tree. ‘Let us sit. The crop is not quite ready to fall, so we should emerge relatively unscathed when we are done.’

  Rose sank onto the bench, and Christopher settled beside her.

  ‘Tell me how Jane came by the piece, Rosie.’

  Rose shrugged. ‘Captain Austen gave it to her. From all we knew of Jane Austen and her life, he purchased two topaz crosses and chains for his sisters after he had come into some prize money from a captured ship.’ She frowned, remembering. ‘I – no one in the present day – had any knowledge of there being a third cross. When I found out who Jane really was, she explained that her brother had become acquainted with a native woman in Gibraltar. When he shared with her that he wanted to bring gifts home to his sister, he spoke specifically about Jane, how different she was from other women in her situation and how trapped and restricted she felt with her lot in life. The woman sold him three charms in the end, one for his mother, one for Cassandra and a special one for Jane alone.’ Rose frowned, remembering bits and pieces of the story. ‘It was essential the cross pass from this woman’s hand to Charles’ and from Charles’ hand to Jane’s. What she also discovered, once she’d settled in modern-day Bath, was that the charm could create a portal by which Jane and Cassandra were able to communicate through time. That’s about all I know.’

  Rose glanced at her father, but he was staring away into the distance, a wistful expression on his face, and she looked around to see if anyone had joined them without her knowledge. Had he stopped listening, when he was the one who had wanted her to go into as much detail as possible? And now he wasn’t paying attention!

  Christopher, however, suddenly turned in his seat to look at her, saying almost to himself, ‘Extraordinary coincidence. It must be.’ He looked into her eyes, but she had the feeling his mind was still far away. ‘This is bringing it all back to me.’

  ‘Bringing back?’

  ‘How I came to be here.’

  ‘But we already know… Oh!’ Her voice tailed away as realisation came. ‘Could Gibraltar be a connection?’

  ‘It may be. As I explained to you, it is not a moment I have dwelled upon for many years. It would have been self-destructive, an indulgence I could ill afford.’ His gaze drifted away again. ‘Any consideration of the impossibility of going into the water and coming out more than two centuries earlier…’ He huffed on a breath. ‘That way lay naught but madness.’

  ‘But Gibraltar can’t be just a coincidence, can it? Jane’s cross comes from there – from a woman who must have had particular powers – and it was a woman with healing powers who nursed you back to health.’

  Christopher smiled, tucking an auburn curl behind Rose’s ear. ‘Life is stranger than fiction, and so it has long been. If we were to read of too much coincidence in a novel, we would laugh at it, scorn it even. Yet in life it happens all the time. A small world, we used to say.’

  With a laugh, Rose nodded. ‘We still do!’ Then, she sobered, keen to continue their train of thought. ‘You never explained. Did the boat sink before you dived into the water?’

  Narrowing his gaze, Christopher stared into the distance. ‘After, I think, but it is such a time ago. I was on the boat… we were fishing.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I felt a tug on my line, a catch at last! It is all I remember before the sudden squall came out of nowhere. Our mast snapped in half almost before we had a chance to understand our peril. We were scrambling, hoping someone had received our SOS when…’

  ‘You said someone was in the water?’ Rose prompted.

  He closed his eyes, and Rose held her breath, not wishing to interrupt his memories. Then, they flew open again. ‘It was a woman!’

  Rose frowned. ‘But how? Was s
he from your own boat? I thought it was just the four men who—’

  ‘It was. I know how it sounds.’ Christopher looked at Rose, then away. ‘I know exactly how it sounds. Only, it is what happened. A woman surfaced, her hair plastered across her face. My only thought, in the moment I dived in, was that she was from another doomed boat herself, or that she had been swimming off the rocks and had got into difficulty. We were truly not that far from the shore.’ He sighed. ‘It makes no sense, of course. I can only tell you that I saw her and reacted. Only—’

  Rose’s mouth was dry. Surely she wasn’t going to have to add mermaids to the list of impossible things she now believed in? ‘What is it?’

  Christopher chuckled, and Rose blinked. What in all this was amusing? ‘As I swam towards her, she eyed our sinking boat then complained loudly my vessel was in no better shape than hers. She began to sink beneath the waves, and I reached out and grabbed her arm… and that is the last I recall of the present day. It is as you said, all went black, but not for a mere second. I lay in darkness for some time, or so it felt.’

  He fell silent, and Rose took his hand, speaking softly. ‘What then?’

  ‘When I first came round, there was some chaos; I remember bodies, not those of my friends, and people trying to help. I tried to get up, but I could not. I faded in and out of consciousness. I had lost all my garments and recall being wrapped in a coarse blanket. I asked after the woman, of course, anxious to see if she had survived, but… My God…’

  Christopher’s eyes widened, and he stood up quickly, pulling Rose up with him before running a hand through his hair.

  ‘Drusilla, the medicine woman. She was there! On the beach. She was on her knees beside me.’ He stared down at Rose. ‘What if it was she, the woman in the water? What if she too had a charmed necklace?’

  Rose stared back, her heart and mind racing. ‘What if it was the very same cross! She sold the charm to Captain Austen – what if she had made use of it herself?’

  Christopher eyed his daughter keenly. ‘When I reached her, in the water, she spoke of a boat… a vessel, and when I came round later, they spoke of a shipwreck. My mind may be playing tricks on me, but which is more improbable? That we would each find our connections to the past by use of the same charm, or to do so through completely different, unrelated means?’

  ‘They are both completely improbable. You know it as well as I do, despite the evidence before us.’

  They stared at each other in silence for a moment, the only sounds being birdsong overhead and the rattle of a cart in the lane.

  Then, Rose drew in a breath, trying to sort through all they had learned. ‘So.’ She spoke slowly, carefully. ‘If it is so, she brought you back, accidentally, to 1788, because that is where the lady who had the charm had come from? Yes!’ Rose could feel something, somewhere, connecting, but it felt out of reach still. ‘It’s like what happened to James!’

  Christopher frowned, and she shook her head.

  ‘My boss. I’ll explain later. He grabbed Morgan’s arm, see – I’ll explain that too – and came back here unintentionally.’

  Her father looked around, his face unsettled. ‘You mean there are more displaced people?’

  Rose could not help but laugh at his expression. ‘No. No one else, to my knowledge. They left again.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ It was clear he didn’t, but Rose wanted to continue.

  ‘But if Drusilla is the same woman, and she did have the charm long before she sold it on to Captain Austen, why didn’t she help you return to where you’d come from?’

  ‘I do not know. I could not ask her as I did not know it was by her hand, accidentally or not, that I had come to the past.’

  ‘But she knew!’

  Christopher inclined his head and together they considered this in silence.

  Rose shook her head. ‘Could it not be that she had inadvertently done exactly as Jane? That carrying multiple people through time with the charm drains it?’

  ‘We will never know. Perhaps she simply did not care.’ Christopher shrugged. ‘I was not in good shape, remember, having swallowed two centuries worth of ocean.’

  Rose was thinking hard. ‘I must speak to Jane. Isn’t it incredible we may have found a connection? I mean, I know it doesn’t help us, with the charm not working, but all the same…’

  ‘Remarkable, my dear. Insane, but remarkable.’

  Rose’s small burst of excitement faded as quickly as it had come. ‘That may be, but I don’t see it tells us anything to help our current predicament.’

  ‘Does it not?’ Christopher mused. ‘Do not discount the value of information. The smallest of details may plant a seed in our minds that later blooms.’

  Rose smiled. ‘Like on a TV show or a movie when someone says something unrelated, and it solves the case for the detective in one flash?’

  Christopher smiled. ‘Possibly. The last TV show I remember watching was Doctor Who.’

  ‘Aiden was on TV sometimes.’ Rose brought up the incongruous thought proudly. ‘I wish you could see it. It was, ironically, called Time Travellers, and he would visit historical sites and talk about the archaeological discoveries there.’

  ‘I can imagine he would do it very well.’

  Rose smiled sadly. ‘I’ve fallen in love with him, and I’ve ruined his life. How will this ever work out?’

  She raised solemn eyes to her father, trying not to let the tears come again, and he reached out and pulled her to him, wrapping his arms around her, and she laid her head against his chest.

  ‘My dear, do not define for him what this journey is or will be. I know from personal experience both tragedy and perfection can live together in harmony. I thought I had lost you. There was nothing to balance that loss at first, but then I found Louisa, created a family and a home here. There is nothing that can compare to such joy. How can both of these things be true in my heart? Yet here I have lived such a contradiction for twenty-five years.’

  Rose hugged him, then stepped back from his embrace. ‘Thank you.’ She was comforted beyond anything to be with her father but the reminder that he had been here twenty-five years had the same effect as if he’d poured a glass of water over her head.

  She shivered. ‘I ought to get back.’

  * * *

  Rose returned to Chawton House feeling a little stronger. It may all be in vain, it may achieve nothing in the long run, but they had found a connection, however slight. Now she needed to talk to Jane and the captain.

  As she walked through the door, however, she could sense the urgent bustle of the household, with a footman hurrying towards the kitchen with a laden tray and the housekeeper shouting instructions to a maid, who scurried across the hallway from the servants’ staircase bearing a bundle of linen… linen that was, unless Rose was mistaken, sodden with blood.

  Chapter 28

  Rose flew along the corridor, her heart pounding fiercely, then took the stairs two at a time, her long skirt held up above her knees, all thought of decorum beyond her. The surgeon had been due in her absence, and she had not been there for Aiden, instead indulging in her own misery and confusion.

  How could she have deserted him in his time of need? How could Jane have let this happen, let that surgeon loose on him? Or Edward? Hadn’t he said it was too soon to take such drastic action as to… as to… with a suppressed sob, Rose fetched up outside Aiden’s room.

  She hesitated, then tapped firmly, not waiting for a response before walking in, fearing to look around in case she saw something she didn’t wish to, her gaze quickly drawn to the ashen face on the white pillows. Aiden’s eyes were closed, the stubble on his face darkening as time passed.

  Her eyes flew then to his arm, and she drew in a sharp breath of relief to see it still there, bandaged tightly once more and strapped again to the splint. An elderly maid was wiping Aiden’s forehead, which was beaded with sweat, and the doctor was conversing quietly near the window with a man who was a stranger to her
.

  ‘Miss Wallace.’

  She turned around. Charles and Cassandra were by the hearth, and the latter hurried across to take her arm and draw her nearer to its warmth.

  ‘You are pale, come, take some comfort and a glass of something. Charles.’ Cassandra turned to her brother, and he walked over to pour brandy into a glass, bringing it to Rose.

  ‘Take it, Miss Wallace. It will revive you.’

  He turned to speak quietly to the doctor and his companion as they passed on their way to the door, and Rose took a sip from the glass, her nose wrinkling at the pungent smell. Cassandra urged her into a nearby armchair, but Rose’s gaze was drawn back towards the bed.

  ‘Is he…? What has happened? I saw sheets stained with so much blood. I thought…’ Her voice failed her.

  Charles glanced at the door to ensure they were alone again, then eyed Rose with severity. ‘We are not barbarians, Miss Wallace. As Edward explained, amputation is a last recourse in all cases, for it brings its own risks. Did I not tell you the surgeon would assess things first?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry. Forgive me.’ She tried to recall where she was, then shook her head. She couldn’t be doing with such trivial things as how she spoke at a time like this. Charles knew where she was from anyway. ‘I feared the worst. Sorry. It’s been a difficult time.’

  His face relaxed. ‘Quite. Do not alarm yourself. The surgeon has adjusted the setting of the bone in an attempt to alleviate the swelling and the numbness in the hand. With the adjacent wound barely having had time to start healing, there was a certain amount of bleeding. It could not be avoided.’

  Rose’s heart dipped. How much pain must Aiden have endured?